Less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door, police shot Yong Yang in his parents’ Koreatown home while he was holding a knife during a bipolar episode.
Parents in Los Angeles’ Koreatown called for mental health help in the middle of their son’s bipolar episode this month. Clinical personnel showed up — and so did police shortly after.
Police fatally shot Yong Yang, 40, who had a knife in his hand, less than 10 seconds after officers opened the door to his parents’ apartment where he had locked himself in, newly released bodycam video shows.
Now the parents of Yang, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 15 years ago, have told NBC News exclusively that they are disputing part of the account captured on bodycam, in which police recount a clinician’s saying Yang was violent before the shooting on May 2.
At this point we need to treat Police with rules similar to the handling of a firearm. Always assume they can go off, only ever point them at something you’re willing to kill, and be aware of possible collateral damage.
Police should NOT be involved in the mental health process.
Currently they are legally required.
They should, they just need to be competent.
I doubt medical personel would be too keen to go alone in situations like these.
Can always trust the cops to show up and make everything infinitely worse.
Yup. The way I like to phrase it is “there’s no problem that cops can’t make worse.”
Don’t call police unless you want someone to die.
Google called police on their own employees. I keep saying this.
When? And why?
It was during a quiet sit-in in protest of Google abetting genocide. They also fired everyone in the area, even people who weren’t directly involved.
“Don’t be evil” was a canary clause. There’s a reason it doesn’t appear in any of their documents anymore.
It does, akshually.
They removed it from the preface of the Code of Conduct to being a footnote in that document no one will read.
this is why SWATing is so freaking scary.
Very genuine question: why do cops never use taser guns for situations like this? Presumably they knew the weapon was a knife, so no risk of a shootout.
HEY! Civilian, stop talking about stuff you know nothing about!
In dangerous situations and non-whites (same thing , right) we need LETHAL FORCE to control the situation. If someone us murd…I mean, fatally shot, so be it.
Tasers are just for torture. It’s fun but we can’t be always playing! We’re working here!
/s
Tasers kinda suck.
Dunno man. Gunshot wounds suck pretty bad too.
very genuine small penis.
Honestly this is what infuriates me when 2nd amendment enthusiasts say “UK cops should carry guns” - fuck off mate, we de-escalate and use non-lethal way more effectively than your wanker cops who only have a hammer and everything is a nail.
Give your cops a toolkit instead of just a hammer and you’ll see the difference.
You’re responding to someone asking why they don’t use their tasers. They have a toolkit. They choose to only use the hammer from it.
Yeah my comment wasn’t intended to be critical of the person I was replying to - it was infact highlighting their point.
American cops don’t tend to use tasers when the suspect is wielding a knife because it’s seen as a lethal weapon, to which they have a lethal response for. Or as another responder replied - the training is the issue, US cops are hardly short of equipment.
The less interactions with Police you have the better. Even if a family member is having a mental health episode, you’re better off trying to figure out something yourself at this point. This same thing keeps happening where people call for help during a mental health crisis and Police kill them.
Police have 1 job…
And it’s to uphold order for the ruling class.
Police are class traitors. ACAB.
And they are trigger-happy like barbaric IDF personnel.
There needs to be a way to call for help from unarmed specialists. 😖
There sort of is now but most people don’t know about it yet. Instead of 911, dial 988. I don’t think 988 sends people to you, but they are trained mental health specialists who can talk instead of shout and threaten violence.
Read more here: https://988lifeline.org/
in the civilized world, there is. You call the police for an event like this, and they send their psych staff over with support. The issue where I am is that they work normal hours, so late night/weekends you’ll get the support team only (who are still not regular, untrained cops).
There needs to be a restructuring of the entire law enforcement system so blood-thirsty cops aren’t required to show up at all 911 calls with guns drawn.
There needs to be accounting and actual oversight from the community, their bosses who pay their checks to ensure they are held accountable and the actual number of times a cop murders a beloved family pet in front of the children, or murders the children, is actually tracked and recorded so we can see how bad the problem really is.
It’s almost as if we should, collectively, as a society, stop over-funding violent, tight-knit groups who cover for each other and ostensibly “uphold the public trust.”
It’s such a nuanced issue and comments like this are just dumb.
If criticism of our current law enforcement organization makes you feel this frustrated, you probably are not one of the people who have the most to worry about from police.
I’m definitely not and make no claims to be. But I’m not talking about criticism of law enforcement, that doesn’t frustrate me. I’m talking about no large scale societal problem is so easy to solve like I see posted here frequently relating to the police, government, climate change etc.
But unless you say ‘hurr durr, acab’ you’re a boot licking cunt.
It’s not the JOB of casual internet browsers to have all the answers, but it IS the job of the people we pay with our taxes to fix the problems with the systems we hired them to manage.
To say that normal, uneducated people on the internet have no voice unless they understand all the nuance and technical details of an issue, or that people who raise complaints against a system need to formulate an actionable and realistic plan? When you say that you are saying that you just don’t like the issue, that you don’t want to see people complaining and you don’t care about the issue because it doesn’t effect you.
If someone shoots me in the stomach, I will plead for help from medical personnel to fix the holes in my body, I may even have some suggestions like “Also, you will need to remove the bullet if possible, and maybe a round of antibiotics after!”
If the doctor rolls his eyes and says “Why do people think this is so simple to solve?” I will fucking go to different ER.
Instead of looking at the people who complain with disdain and impatience, ask why the problems of others are so ill-informed and see if you can figure out a way to help people foment better arguments. Otherwise you’re basically shining the boots for licking.
Oh fuck off
Thank you for proving that you’re not actually at all serious or care about anything and thus all your thoughts are not to be counted on this issue. You’re just pounding keys to express your anger at someone or something and want to make someone mad or make yourself worked up to validate your negative state. Got it.
I will say, I work ambulance for a very right wing rural community. I have done this for a number of years now.
While I do have issues at times with our local LEO, they do a good job with not shooting my patients, or their dogs.
They have done a good job in my community with securing the scene without escalating and then standing back and let us deal with medical/mental health crisis.
These stories do happen to often, and there are policy changes that need to happen, but there are a significant number of communities that have law enforcement who are acting appropriately and therefore get no news coverage.
The problem is not with the police organizations who are doing everything right, the problem is that much of the time we wouldn’t know if they are doing things wrong, because they cover for each other, because they are not incentivised to uphold their own standards, and run without enough supervision from local and federal bodies.
I’m sure there are millions of great police teams working in good communities out there. I think most people know that as well. We’re not calling for the good cops to be run out of town, we’re calling for the good cops to hold each other accountable.
The number of good cops doesn’t balance the equation here. If a major auto manufacturer announced that 2% of it’s millions of cars on the road had a fault where they may suddenly and spontaneously run off the road and seek out run over pets and dark skinned youths, but it’s okay because the rest of the 98% of the cars are just fine, well the public would be outraged and rightfully so. We don’t accept “some bad apples” in a lot of industries like doctors and pilots, so why are we accepting bad apples in police, the one organization that holds our society to account to follow laws and who’re we’re supposed to turn to in times of need?
“police recount a clinician’s saying Yang was violent before the shooting on May 2”
Yeah, they knew that surely.
They knew they were going into an environment where someone with diminished mental capacity had access to bladed weapons.
They likely knew he was actively wielding bladed weapons.
They had access to less than lethal methods of self defence, tasers, body armour, mace, tranquilizers, superior numbers, training in hand to hand combat, fucking nets etc.
They chose to use firearms in lieu of these and shot a mentally ill person to death unnecessarily.
Guns should be a last resort, not a first resort
American cops are such fucking pussies
Acab tho but especially American ones
Tale as old as time.
This keeps happening and it is infuriating. It’s also scary for people with SMI/SEMI (severe and enduring mental illnesses) such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as if the fear of the illness itself wasn’t enough.
do not call the police. many countries outside the united states understand this already
It’s normal practice in the UK for police to aid the handling of mentally unstable people. The difference is that British police don’t shoot people. Ever.
Eh no?
Most counties outside the US have actual police forces which are there to serve and protect.
Maybe in Europe. SA, Africa, Asia, Indonesia probably not so much.
Your Euro-centric bias is showing.
Uhm, in Germany it’s completely normal for police to assist in situations of mental health and instead of shooting them they talk to them, or, as a last resort, restrain people and bring them back to a care facility, unharmed.
Police receive proper 3 year training and most of them even have a required university degree.
Police receive proper 3 year training
Pretty sure that’s 6 weeks in the US.
6 weeks of teaching them to shoot first I assume.
this is the way. there is a place for policing in society, and it should be composed of highly trained, educated professionals held to a high standard.
The training is the difference.
While the cops in Germany are a lot better trained and won’t kill you or harm you, many are still on power trips and try to screw you over. Some abuse their authority especially towards teens and they try to fine you if you’re an adult. Society needs that job, but man I rarely hear about good encounters with police. I feel like older people had a better experience with cops and younger people in Germany like the police a lot less, but I could be wrong.
You’re definitely right, it’s still a place where people with fantasies of power end up. It’s not all just sunshine and the media might be biased but compared to some countries it’s still a pretty high standard which should be the minimum in the US as well.
988 - the mental health hotline that is supposed to be the alternative to 911 - will call the cops too. There’s no winning.
The US only has 911 for emergencies AFAIK, who else would you call? Of course, police is basically useless here as opposed to an ambulance, particularly in the US when they know little more than brute force, but IDK how much say you have in what service they dispatch.
We have separate numbers for each service other than the central Europe-wide 112, and they are free unless misuse happens. A boarding school roommate had a mental health breakdown so severe an ambulance was called, with actual trauma-trained doctors who provided basic psychiatric treatment (sedation pills and further care advice to dormkeepers). So an ambulance is helpful for mental health crises but I cannot imagine cops helping in any way in this case - they have restraint tools that might thwart violence or suicide attempts but this situation did not need them, and a doctor on the phone (which you get immediately) can help with everything else better than the police anyway.
Just fyi, 112 is normally a GSM standard emergency number and should work anywhere in the world on a GSM network. (In theory, so always worth a try in case of need)
I feel like I’m reading this same story once a month. There are so many people that need help and then the police show up and murder them. All the time.
That’s not entirely true.
Sometimes they just shoot the family dog(s) for barking and go back to work like nothing happened.
There are countless stories of people cradling their dogs as they bleed out from bullet wounds weeping as the cops write up a ticket or something. Just constantly, all the time, and for some reason we don’t DO anything about it. Like, as a group, we could end this nightmare tomorrow if we could all cooperate for one goddamn day without horrible shitty people trying to politicize and subvert every community action we try to do to make the world a little better.
This is one of my biggest (hopefully irrational) fears. My dog is not violent but she is reactive, there’s no way she wouldn’t be shot dead if police ever had occasion to come into our house.
So damn true on all points. And yeah we could do so much if we could organize but trying to get Americans off their ass just once to stand up for something is damn near impossible. I wish I was in France. Those mofo’s start a riot the moment the government does anything even remotely stupid.
Note to everyone here: 988 is a new emergency number for mental health crises. https://988lifeline.org/
They too will call authorities when a dangerous weapon is in play.
Cops aren’t your friend. They aren’t there to help you or protect you. They are there to oppress you.
